SCO, IBM Dispute Headed for Hearing, Dec 05, 2003

A federal court judge is expected to hear arguments Friday in SCO Group's contract dispute over whether IBM allegedly breached a contract with the company by contributing unauthorized portions of Unix-based AIX code to the open source movement.

SCO claims that, as a result, Linux is an unauthorized derivative of its UNIX intellectual property.

On Friday in SCO's home state of Utah, U.S. District Court Judge Brooke Wells is expected to hear from lawyers representing SCO and IBM, each with motions to compel the other side to provide more information for discovery.

As far as revolutions go, the opening salvo was muffled. But for those within earshot, the reverberations were far- reaching. Last month, China - the largest single potential market for almost anything - selected an upstart computer-operating system called Linux for installation on 1 million computers next year. Ultimately, the country plans to install similar systems on 100 million to 200 million machines.

But the deal represents much more than a software deal - or China's declaration of independence from software giant Microsoft. Analysts say it marks a significant victory for an emerging way of building things. Open and highly dispersed networks of motivated people are organizing around galvanizing ideas, often offering results of their work for free.

A critical vulnerability which has been reported in rsync, an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer, may have been used to compromise a server at the Gentoo Linux project.

An advisory from the rsync developers said this vulnerability was recently used in combination with a Linux kernel vulnerability to compromise the security of a public rsync server.

Webmaster's note: Those interested in seeing the original SCO "open letter", you can find it here

As if on the stand, McBride stated his case in no uncertain terms. "The GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws," he said in the letter.

Enterprises needing server software support from SuSE Linux AG running on IBM middleware can turn to a new software integration center launched Thursday in Toronto by the two vendors.

The collaboration will focus on the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) operating system and, initially, on the IBM DB2 Universal Database offerings, but will be extended to other IBM products, SuSE said.

In an effort to cater to vertical markets and customers who want customized applications that require changes to the Linux kernel, Hewlett-Packard Co. is planning to expand support offerings to customers who run the Debian Project's version of the operating system.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has just rolled out its first Linux-based desktop software and is working to secure deals with governments and businesses to deploy it, but the company isn't targeting Microsoft Corp., a Sun executive said Thursday.

Hackers have forced the Gentoo Linux project to take a server offline

The attack and subsequent compromise comes after several machines belonging to the Debian Linux project were breached by attackers last month. A forensic analysis of the Debian machines revealed that no software packages or source code offered for download were affected--a claim now being made by Gentoo.

The maintainers of the Gentoo Linux distribution released a statement that describes the incident: "One of the servers that makes up the rsync.gentoo.org rotation was compromised via a remote exploit," it reads. "The compromised system had both an IDS and a file integrity checker installed and...we are reasonably confident that the portage tree stored on that box was unaffected."

Almost every week, it seems, another government is jumping on the Linux bandwagon, badmouthing Microsoft all the way. But for all the headlines, the open-source software movement remains very much a fringe business, raising troubling questions for investors who've plowed into publicly traded Linux providers in the past year.

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